That Way Madness Lies
by Bellicose Blue
Summary: These violent delights have violent ends. /Or, Clove finds that insanity is freeing but rarely beneficial.


You are Clove.

You are nearly-almost-practically-close enough to sixteen, so even though it isn't technically legal, you volunteer for the Reaping. The District wants a Victor this year, anyway.

You are the most likely candidate. You are clever enough to devise strategies and fast despite your size and merciless perfection with your knives. You're proud and arrogant, the kind of haughty the Capitol's grown to expect from Careers, but there's a sort of brightness to your face, a youthfulness (never innocence) lighting your dark eyes. You're perfectly on-trend with your pale skin and freckles that the people of the Capitol seek this season, their latest pursuit of beauty. The only thing that isn't marketable about you is your personality.

Enobaria describes you as "all bloodlust and no subtlety", even though you're clearly much more subtle than your partner, whose angle is just a brutal killing machine. Brutus adds that you're too tiny to be a believable killer. And Cato, laughing, calls you a psychotic bitch.

You hate Cato.

It's the way he likes to loom over you when you're arguing like usual, so you have to crane your neck backwards to meet his eyes. It's the relaxed rippling of muscles down his arm as he pins you down in the wrestling arena with one hand as you flail and kick and bite and inevitably fail. It's the way his icy eyes linger over Glimmer's curves even as you're desperately trying to evade Marvel, who seems to grow more creepily persistent by the minute.

You especially hate the way he interrupts you when you're ranting about the star-crossed idiots by kissing you for a moment, and then he turns his attention back to the recaps of the interviews while you sit there gasping like a fish.

If you can't kill him now, you'll kill him in the arena.

You like the layout of the arena. It's a friendly one this year, a forested place with a lake off to one side and a meadow full of swaying grasses. You're sure there's numerous traps hidden throughout, but it's warm enough and has plenty of cover. You think you'll do just fine.

You especially like the Bloodbath. All those times you'd killed animals as part of your training, slaughtering livestock shipped from Ten, they'd never quite measured up to how _beautiful_ human death is. You get absorbed in the fluidity of your knife as it glides through the air and across flesh, the terror in the eyes of your victims as they scream. You're proud of your kill count when the carnage is over and there's just your allies left, watching each other and you warily.

You don't particularly like that Cato seizes control of your temporary alliance, although you suppose it can't be helped. He's the most likely spokesperson, after all, and you don't think the blond ditzes from One would take orders from you very well. They're prejudiced against you for your youth and your size, and despite what they know you to be capable of, they still don't believe you have more than a passing shot at victory.

You're practically _ecstatic_ when the bimbo dies a few nights later- not so pretty now, is she? Oh, there was that pesky bit where you spent a day and a half trapped in a sea of your worst fears come to life, but that pales in comparison to most of your childhood. You've learned how to combat fear. Cato is only afraid of one thing, and that's death. You've embraced death and made it your own.

Perhaps you're unhinged like Cato suggests, but you don't even care. So what if you like to hunt and kill? You're only human. You've got to get it all out of your system now before you become a Victor and this kind of frivolous slaughter becomes off-limits. That's why you help restrain the boy from Ten as Cato taunts and teases him with the deadly edge of his sword before slicing across his neck, and you laugh when blood flecks on your face. You leave it there. It looks good with your freckles.

You still hate Cato, but you find yourself pathetically _afraid_ of him when your supplies are blown to bits and there's nobody else to blame. He snaps the neck of the weakling from Three, the boy you'd never bothered to learn the name of (you'd called him honey and darling and pet in the _sweetest_ voice just to watch him flinch). Then he turns on you and Marvel, still seething, still infuriated, and Marvel turns tail and flees into the woods. You smirk at Cato, bold despite the fear thudding in your heart, and ask him if he can't _control_ himself any more now that his little toy is gone, wonder if he's just a child beneath that steroid-pumped body, and he snaps.

Cato throws you to the ground like you weigh nothing and crushes you with his weight as you scramble for a hold on the dry, dusty earth. His hands move to your neck, and for a moment you think he'll snap it like he did that poor forgettable boy. But no, he wants to draw your death out for as gloriously long as a girl from Two deserves. He closes his fingers around your neck and starts to choke you.

You're supposed to struggle, to fight back, to bite and kick and claw at his arms as the life drains from your eyes. You're not supposed to _like_ it. You arch beneath his fingers, and Cato releases you, stunned. You can see the sentience returning to his eyes, the brute displaced by the boy, and he stares at you for a moment before bursting into laughter. Your throat hurts, but you grin at him mirthfully even as he grabs you by the hair and hauls your head up to meet his. Your second kiss is rough, surrounded by the smoldering ruins of your supplies, and you feel a part of you burn along with it.

The next evening, they announce the rule change, and Cato shrugs, says it was always going to come down to the two of you anyway. You scowl at him, tell him how annoyed you are that you'll have to listen to his stupid chatter for the rest of your life, and you can practically hear the laughter in the Capitol when he pouts.

You spend the next couple of days hunting with him. Sponsors sent you some food to make up for your supplies, and it lasts you long enough to bring down a pair of birds dripping in fat. Someone's set up snares in this part of the woods and you slip the prey from them, give them to Cato to hold as you bound through the forest in glee. Soon you'll have killed off all the others and you can go back home and never have to worry about feeding yourself ever again. You keep an eye out for any flashes of movement, just in case some tributes are nearby, but that part of your hunting goes rather dismally.

Oh well. There's a feast the next morning, and you'll have plenty of time to hunt then. You arrange yourself opposite from Cato in the woods around the Cornucopia and wait for dawn. He's to hunt down whoever runs first, and you'll get the second one, this has already been decided. You quiver with excitement as a table rises from the ground, laden with backpacks, and the first victim darts forth.

The redhead goes into Cato's portion of the woods, and you know he's begun to chase after her when a dark-haired girl springs out and starts racing forward. You rush out to meet her, blood already simmering, and hiss when her arrow hits your arm. The pain makes you mad, and you throw a knife at her in a way to incapacitate your opponent, not kill her instantly. You force her down onto the ground like Cato had done to you so very long ago, knees trapping her as you free your favorite knife.

But all too soon, before you even have the chance to do more than taunt, you're plucked from the air and tossed aside to the ground. You don't like the pain that follows. You scream, though you know there's no point, and you're not even afraid of death, are you? But you scream, and Cato returns to you, and he's too late.

Your third kiss is a brush of lips, sweet and soft that curls in your throat like the remnants of honey that won't glide down. You hate it, hate the pain, hate _him_ , and you know he left you to die. He never wanted to share the glory with you after all. You bite his lip as hard as you can, tearing the skin, and he tugs away and smirks down at you knowingly, like he's _amused_ that you've found him out far too late. You regret ever trusting him, ever believing in his remorse, ever even thinking he might love you.

You were right to hate him in the end.

* * *

"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath."


End file.
